Hot pepper and latex: one Edmonton mailman's cold weather survival guide
'Everybody's got their own little home remedies, from taking cayenne pepper pills to wearing latex'
Hands numb, his beard thick with frost on the most brutal of winter days, Edmonton letter carrier Greg Mady chows down on cayenne pepper capsules in a futile attempt to fend off the cold.
"They work when you take them," Mady said. "You can feel a little furnace going on inside of you, but they still don't last long enough for me."
Mady's daily dose of red hot chillies is just one of the coping mechanisms Canada Post workers have developed to survive their long shifts exposed to the elements — trade secrets he was willing to share with CBC.
His fellow mail carriers will go to extremes to keep warm, Mady said.
"Everybody's got their own little home remedies, from taking cayenne pepper pills to wearing latex surgical gloves under their own gloves," Mady said. "Everybody's got their own solutions and you've got to find your own."
After years of letters and parcels in all weather, Mady has developed his own coping mechanisms.
He grows a long, scruffy beard in preparation for winter, and has an elaborate glove system to keep his fingers from turning purple.
"I do the surgical gloves, I do the magic mitts and then I put on what I refer to as smoker's gloves — the ones that have the mitt part that you can pull back over fingers," Mady said. "And then inside of that, I have one of those little hot packs."
But Mady said layers upon layers of clothing are the most effective way to deal with glacial weather.
When temperatures plunge to truly polar depths, though, all the wool, latex and face whiskers in the world can't take the bite off Edmonton's longest season.
'Have a hot bath until you can feel it again'
"You can prepare, but it only goes so far," Mady said. "I have heated boots now, but the batteries die and then you're on your own. I haven't felt my hands and feet almost every day. But so far no frostbite.
"You just come home and have a hot bath until you can feel it again."
Even when his feet are throbbing from exposure, and he can no longer feel his face, Mady still smiles. He often sings to himself while walking the same sidewalks delivering Christmas cards and packages.
Still, Mady said he would never trade his job for the relative warmth of a mailroom.
"I'm going to be really sad if we lose door-to-door delivery because that's the part of the job that I like, interacting with the customers and being outside," he said. "To be honest I find the heat of the summer worse than the depths of the winter.
"There is something to be said for the simple solitude of being the only one out in minus-20 weather, walking the streets. You have it to yourself. The neighbourhood is yours."
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With files from Tanara McLean